Lots and lots of temples and one shrine

Sorry about the totally uninformative post yesterday, but by the time I had time to sit down and actually write something, I was exhausted to the point of passing out.

I have a sneaking suspicion that my host mom is testing the limits of what I’m willing to eat. The first day I was here, she asked if I had anything that I wasn’t willing to eat. I answered that I’ll eat anything. Really, anything? Yes, anything. Meat? Yes. Vegetables? Yes. Spicy foods? Yes. Seaweed? Yes, anything. What about raw fish? Yes, really, I’ll eat anything. Finally after much questioning she managed to worm out of me that I don’t particularly care for American food. American food? Why not? Aren’t I an American? Doesn’t everyone like American food? Well, I don’t particularly care for it, but I’ll eat it.

So over the past few days I have had in succession: possibly every kind of seaweed known to mankind (and they are all delicious), “spicy” curry (which was ridiculously spicy by Japanese standards and not spicy at all by American standards), those little tiny baby fish (you know the ones that are about the size of a pencil lead so all you can make out is the eyes?) in onigiri (also delicious), a whole cooked fish approximately as long as my hand which my host mom said was called “hatahata” (yes, the eyes were still in, and IT WAS DELICIOUS even if it was difficult to eat because I had to pick the backbone out of the fish without breaking it into a thousand pieces (which I did anyway)), and something which my host mom described as being like Japanese pepper but spicier in onigiri (which despite my host mom’s warnings I did not find spicy at all AND IT WAS DELICIOUS).

You know, I bet it gets boring reading my blog after a while, ‘cause whenever I eat anything it’s followed by “it was delicious.” Sorry. I’ll try to eat more nasty food.

Speaking of nasty food, yesterday we went on a field trip up to Fushimi Inari Taisha, and, I being the spazz brain I am, completely forgot my camera (or really I thought it was in my purse and then realized that I’d put it in my other bag AUGH). However, if you go to Google (product placement, oh no!) and type in “Fushimi Inari Taisha” you can see some pictures. (Plus some of the other people in the program promised that they’d send me pictures.) Anyway, it’s a huge (huge, huge, huge) shrine dedicated to Inari, the god of rice (who happens to be a fox), and I believe it has the most torii of any shrine in Japan. (A torii is the reddish-orange gate in front of the shrine.) It was pretty much gorgeous and amazing, even though I started having trouble breathing ‘cause the climb was so strenuous. (The shrine's located on a mountain.) But anyway, well worth the trip.

But after that we went to an izakaya, which is supposedly a Japanese-style bar, but it wasn’t like a bar at all. And the food was really not very good at all. We ordered something that was supposed to be spicy chicken, and turned out to be oil and oil with oily oil and a side of oil with some chicken sprinkled on top. Nobody wanted to finish it. And the other food was just really oily and not very good. Oh well.

Anyway, today we walked tetsugaku no michi (or the philosopher’s path, for those of you whose preferred language is English) and visited a bunch of temples (the most impressive of which was Ginkakuji). I took a whole lot of pictures, so I’ll try to upload those at some point. Unfortunately, it was ridiculously hot, so by the end of the day we were all exhausted and grossly sweaty.

(Also, during lunch, one of the guys decided to try to translate James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" into Japanese while singing in a ridiculously high falsetto. Um, yeah. I don't know what else to say about that.)

And then I went with my host mom and my littler host brother on a firefly watching walk, which was pretty awesome. A bunch of people from the neighborhood got together to walk along the river and look for fireflies. (Unfortunately, there weren’t very many. Apparently there were a lot more last year.) Along the way I wound up running into one of the girls I met at the conversation lunch thing yesterday, and we wound up having a nice conversation. (Which was good, ‘cause none of the other neighborhood people would talk to me. Maybe they thought I didn’t speak Japanese, or maybe they just didn’t want to talk to the foreigner. I dunno. For some reason, this time around, everyone has assumed that I don’t speak any Japanese at all. Kind of odd, really. Maybe because a lot of foreigners in Kyoto don't speak any Japanese?)

And now I must sleep because I am about to pass out. G’night!